Hi, I’m just looking at FMOD with a view to using it an audiogame engine (i.e. games primarily aimed at the visually impared/blind).

As you can imagine audio quality is everything

At some point soon is FMOD going to support multiple simultanious environments? What I need is for example the listener to be in one environment (say a room) with his own 3d reverbs and a source in a room connected by an apeture to be in a completely different 3d reverb environment, meaning the early reflections/reverb will have to come from almost a point source and be occluded by the geometry with the dry sound.

eax4 has a couple of params (reverb pan/reflections pan) that can help, but I don’t want to be reliant on hardware that a lot of people aren’t going to have.

CPU usage is not going to be a problem as there is going to be no visual UI.

as an aside, your mulitple licensing is a great idea.
as another aside, the low contrast of the fmod designer gives me eyestrain, any chance of an option for default platform colours?

In the near future we’ll release a version that allows the user to specify 3D reverb zones that the listener can move through. There’ll be a single 3D reverb DSP module whose properties are morphed according to the presence of the listener in one or more of these zones. The concept of ‘presence’ includes reverb occlusion properties of the world geometry.

The 3D reverb will affect any audible 3D source even if the source is outside any reverb zone, because the reverb is intended to be centred on the listener. Each source’s reverb contribution will be governed by its Room parameter.

Later we’ll release a version that allows multiple physical reverb zones. This is probably what you’re after – these reverb zones will affect both the listener and 3D sources which have a presence within the zone. I can’t give you a date for this but it’s in the pipeline.

You can define reverb spheres and if the listener is in the intersection of multiple spheres FMOD will blend between them. These spheres can be confined by occlusion geometry if the room is non-spherical.

We are currently implementing FMOD in UE3, and our plan is to use UE3 reverb volumes (or similar volumes) for setting FMOD reverb areas.

If the listener is placed in one reverb volume with a short "Sewer Pipe" preset and a sound is played from an adjacent reverb volume with a longer "Concert Hall" preset – what will the listener experience be?

As I understand it the reverb is listener based, so the listener will hear the sound with the "Sewer Pipe" preset, unless the listener is located near the "Concert Hall" volume – then he will hear a "blend" where the parameters of the reverb is set to an average of the preset values. Am i right?

Is it possible to have multiple simultaneously active reverb engines or are we confined to just one?

With fmod’s 3d reverb system it will only be the reverb that the listener is in.

If the listener is not in the sewer volume, there wont be any sewer preset contributing to the reverb.
Its not possible to do multiple physical reverbs as I mentioned in the previous post (right now).

An alternate method is to drop the 3d reverb system and just use setReverbProperties where you can actually create up to 4 physical reverbs and control the wet dry mixes yourself. It just means you’d be rewriting a 3d reverb volume system.